Date: 23/11/2010

Cavium enhances its OCTEON II Multi-core Family with four new processor families

Cavium Networks has added four new processor families namely CN60XX, CN61XX, CN62XX, and CN66XX to its family of OCTEON II processors. These processors integrate one to ten cnMIPS64 cores and deliver 0.4 GHz to 48GHz of 64 bit compute power in a single chip with up to 32 general-purpose MIPS cores along with the advanced networking, security and storage hardware accelerators. OCTEON II processors also feature four new technologies to achieve low power, deep packet inspection, virtualization and anti-counterfeiting

"With this announcement Cavium has dramatically expanded its OCTEON II product line, providing the widest possible choice to OEM customers," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. "Cavium's approach of combining many high-performance physical cores allows it to more easily scale cost, power, and performance to meet the diverse needs of its many Tier 1 customers."

"Close Tier 1 customer engagements have led to this expansion of OCTEON II family which features several compelling innovations and significantly increases our competitive position," said Rajiv Khemani, Vice President and General Manager of Networking and Communications, Cavium Networks. "With these OCTEON II processors, we have also increased our addressable applications to include considerably higher usage in control plane, wireless, security equipment and intelligent adapters."

The target applications of the new OCTEON II processors include:
1) CN60XX (1 - 2 Cores): WLAN Access points (AP), Entry-level VPN/UTM/Firewalls, Low-cost Control Plane applications, Satellite and Broadband Gateways.
2) CN61XX and CN62XX (2 - 4 Cores): Enterprise Switches & Routers with Integrated Data and Control, High-performance Control Plane, UTM & Security Appliances, Printers, Small to Medium Business (SMB) and Low to Mid-range Enterprise class NAS/iSCSI appliances.
3) CN66XX (6 - 10 cores): WAN Optimization, Enterprise, Data Center and Storage applications requiring 2x10GbE performance and connectivity and High-performance 3G/4G Base Stations.

The product family supports I/Os such as XAUI, SGMII, RGMII, SRIO, PCIe Gen 2 and USB. These new processors join the existing CN68XX, CN67XX, and CN63XX OCTEON II.

The key features of the new OCTEON II family of processors include:
1. Power Optimizer dynamically adjusts power in real time depending upon the application-level processing requirement.
2. Hyper Finite Automata (HFA) provides the Deep Packet Inspection solution by combining both DFA and NFA architectures into one cohesive solution.
3. EmVisor provides hardware support for a complete SoC virtualization. This enables OCTEON II CPUs to act like a series of Virtual SoCs, each with their own virtual memory, Ethernet ports, PCIe Bus and EmVisor also provides a virtual switch between Virtual SoCs. This also enables in-field software upgrades in customer equipment.
4. Authentik is a technology that allows the whole multi-core processing chip to be locked; so that OEMs that entrust third parties to assemble their systems can be assured that no rogue or counterfeit copies of their systems are also being manufactured.

Availability: Expected to sample in Q2 2011